Talk about your forties movies and Christmas miracles, she thought, her eyes following the child that had to be her own.
Jill excused herself and looked at her watch as she walked up the aisle. Parents were starting to arrive, peering through the sanctuary doors and congregating in the back pews.
“All right, showstoppers,” Jill said, “it’s a wrap, for tonight, at least. Angels, practice your songs. You were a little rusty on ‘It came upon a Midnight Clear.’”
Glory wondered if she’d be able to stand without her knees buckling. She fumbled through her purse for aspirin and took two tablets with what remained of her water.
Just then, the little girl on the stage broke away from the other angels and shepherds and came running down the aisle, grinning.
Glory’s eyes widened as her daughter drew nearer and nearer, turned slightly in her seat to see her fling her arms around a man clad in blue jeans, boots and a sheepskin coat.
Jesse.
“Hi’ya, Munchkin,” he said, bending to kiss the child where her rich, red-brown hair was parted.
Glory’s mouth dropped open. He knew, she thought frantically. Then she shook her head.
He couldn’t know; fate couldn’t be that cruel. His grandfather wouldn’t have told him, Dylan hadn’t known the truth, though he might have guessed, and Delphine had been sworn to secrecy.
At that moment Jesse’s maple-colored eyes found Glory’s face. They immediately narrowed.
Glory felt no more welcome in the First Lutheran Church than she had in the cemetery the day before. She sat up a little straighter, despite the fact that she was in a state of shock, and maintained her dignity. Jesse might be sheriff, but that didn’t give him the right to intimidate people.
He opened his mouth, then closed it again. After raising the collar of his macho coat, he turned his attention back to the child, ignoring Glory completely.
“Come on, Liza,” he said, his voice sounding husky and faraway to Glory even though she could have reached out and touched the both of them. “Let’s go.”
Liza. Glory savored the name. Unable to speak, she watched Jesse and the child go out with the others. When she turned around again, Jill was kneeling backward in the pew in front of Glory’s, looking down into her face.
“Feeling better?”
Glory nodded. Now that the initial shock had passed, a sort of euphoria had overtaken her. “I’ll be fine.”
Jill stood, shrugged into her plaid coat and reached for her purse. “Jesse’s looking good, isn’t he?”
“I didn’t notice,” Glory replied as the two women made their way out of the church. Jill turned out the lights and locked the front doors.
Her expression was wry when she looked into Glory’s eyes again. “You were always a lousy liar, my friend. Some things never change.”
Glory started to protest, then stopped herself. “Okay,” she conceded, spreading her hands wide, as Jill led the way to a later-model compact car parked at the curb. She was too shaken to offer an argument, friendly or otherwise. “He looks terrific.”
“They say he’s never gotten over you.”
Glory got into the car and snapped her seat belt in place. Strange, she’d spent the past eight years thinking about Jesse, but now a gangly child with auburn hair and green eyes was upstaging him in her mind. “The little girl—Liza. Where did she come from?”
Jill started the engine and smiled sadly before pulling out into traffic. “You remember Jesse’s big brother, Gresham, don’t you? He married Sandy Piper, from down at Fawn Creek. They couldn’t have children, I guess, so they adopted Liza.”
Glory let her head fall back against the headrest, feeling dizzy again. The car and Jill and even the snowy night all fell away like pages torn from a book, and suddenly Glory was eighteen years old again, standing in Judge Seth Bainbridge’s imposing study….
She was pregnant, and she was scared sick.
The judge didn’t invite her to take a chair. He didn’t even look at her. He sat at his desk and cleaned out his pipe with a scraping motion of his penknife, speaking thoughtfully. “I guess you thought you and your mama and that brother of yours could live pretty high on the hog if you could just trap Jesse, didn’t you?”
Glory clenched her fists at her sides. She hadn’t even told Jesse about the baby yet, and she figured the judge only knew because he and Dr. Cupples were poker buddies. “I love Jesse,” she said.
“So does every other girl between here and Mexico.” At last, Jesse’s grandfather raised sharp, sky-blue eyes to her face. “Jesse’s eighteen years old. His whole life is ahead of him, and I won’t see him saddled to some social-climbing little chippie with a bastard growing in her belly. Is that clear?”
The words burned Glory, distorted her soul like some intangible acid. She retreated a step, stunned by the pain. She couldn’t speak, because her throat wouldn’t open.
The judge sighed and began filling his pipe with fresh tobacco. The fire danced on the hearth, its blaze reflected in the supple leather of the furniture. “I believe I asked you if I’d made myself clear, young lady.”
Glory swallowed hard. “Clear enough,” she got out.
The defiance he’d heard in her tone brought the judge’s gaze slicing to Glory’s face again. He and Jesse had a tempestuous relationship, but he obviously regarded himself as his grandson’s protector. “You’ll go away to Portland and have that baby,” he said. He waved one hand. “For all I know, it could belong to any man in the county, but I’m taking you at your word that Jesse’s the father. I’ll meet all your expenses, of course, but you’ve got to do something in return for that. You’ve got to swear you’ll never come back here to Pearl River and bother my grandson again.”
She was trembling from head to foot, though the room was suffocatingly warm. “When I tell Jesse about the baby,” she dared to say, “he’ll want our child. And he’ll want me, too.”
Judge Bainbridge sighed with all the pathos of Job. “He’s young and foolish, so you’re probably right,” the bitter old man concluded. He shook his head mournfully. “You leave me no choice but to drive a hard bargain, Missy. A very hard bargain, indeed.”
Glory felt afraid, and she wished she hadn’t been scared to tell Dylan about her pregnancy. He would have gotten mad all right, but then he’d probably have come with her to answer Judge Bainbridge’s imperious summons. “What are you talking about?”
The most powerful man in all of Pearl River County smiled up at Glory from his soft leather chair. “Your brother—Dylan, isn’t it? He’s had a couple of minor scrapes with the law in recent months.”
Glory’s heart pounded to a stop, then banged into motion again. “It wasn’t anything serious,” she said, wetting her lips with a nervous tongue. “Just speeding. And he did tip over that outhouse on Halloween night, but there were others…”
Since Jesse had been one of those others, she left the sentence unfinished.
The judge lit his pipe and drew on the rich, aromatic smoke. He looked like the devil sitting there, presiding over hell, with the fire outlining his harsh features. “Dylan’s about to go off to the air force and make something of himself,” he reflected, as though speaking to himself. “But I guess they wouldn’t want him if he were to be caught trying to break into a store or a house.”
Glory felt the color drain from her face. Everybody knew Judge Bainbridge owned the sheriff and the mayor and the whole town council. If he wanted to, he could frame Dylan for anything short of murder and make it stick. “You wouldn’t—Judge Bainbridge, sir, my brother doesn’t have